


don't wake me (i'm not dreaming)

by jokeperalta



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Blood and Injury, F/M, Late Night Conversations, Minor Injuries, One Shot, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, i'm always a slut for ppl touching frank castle with care and love, just ya typical frank-shows-up-at-karens-and-she-patches-him-up fic, minor buzzfeed dragging, nothing groundbreaking here, probably not canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-14 23:57:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13018938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jokeperalta/pseuds/jokeperalta
Summary: It’s seven minutes past three in the morning and there’s a dead body on her fire escape.





	don't wake me (i'm not dreaming)

**Author's Note:**

> this doesn't have any particular canon setting and i'm not even sure it works with the logistics of karen's apartment but it wouldnt leave me alone so here it is

It’s seven minutes past three in the morning and there’s a dead body on her fire escape.

The dark humanoid shape blocks most of the small window and freezes her to the spot in fear for a good minute. The list of unsavoury people she may well have pissed off is longer than she'd care to admit, but this? This is new.

Scare tactic? Warning? Threat? All three?

Whatever it is, Karen resolves not to let it work on her a moment longer. No need to let them win, whoever they are. She takes her gun from her bag -just in case- and takes the heavy torch from the kitchen cabinet.

The body moves under the torch light, and her fingers tighten around her gun. It looks over its shoulder and dark eyes squint behind a dark hood into the light. It illuminates a bloodied boxer's nose and thin split lips.

She knows that face. She would know that face anywhere.

Amendment: it's eleven minutes past three in the morning and there's a legally, but not physically, dead man on her fire escape.

"Jesus _Christ_ , Frank," Karen says, mostly to herself, dropping her gun on her table and running over to wrench open her window.

"Ma'am." His teeth are bloody too. "Sorry to wake you."

"You didn't," she says. It’s a good job she woke up when she did. "You're just bleeding out on my fire escape, which I find much ruder, by the way."

She thinks she sees him roll his eyes. Karen tries to help him in, concerned enough that she momentarily forgets the common sense logic of big, bulky men in big, bulky body armour and small windows not being an ideal combination. It's a spectacularly ungraceful struggle but finally the window vomits him through it.

He looks unsteady on his feet when he tries to get up himself, so she has to help him over to the corner of her sofa so he can sit. His flesh is freezing cold where he touches her and it's easier to pretend that's the only reason he's raising goosebumps. Karen grabs the blanket from the couch that she was sleeping under not ten minutes earlier and pulls it around his shoulders.

It's only a little odd, seeing the Punisher cocooned in one of her paisley patterned rugs. He looks like he wants to protest at the concept while begrudgingly enjoying the reality.

Aside from the bloodied nose and split lip there's a long thin gash threading from his left temple to just below his ear. His eyes follow her as she examines it.

"Dodged a knife," he explains.

"You and I have very different definitions of the word 'dodge'," Karen says, looking at the amount of dried blood that has streamed out of it for however long he'd been out there.

"Stay put," she says seriously. She's reluctant to turn her back on him, as though he'll slip out still bleeding and take down a couple of bent cops while she's not looking.

Karen retrieves a bottle of disinfectant alcohol and a first aid kit from the cupboard under her sink. "It ain't that bad," he says behind her. "Just a scalp wound- they always bleed like hell."

"Spoken like a man who gets too many scalp wounds."

She hands him a couple of wet wipes to mop the dry blood from the side of his head and under his nose. The cut on his head could probably use real stitches but he’s going to have to make do with butterfly closures.

He winces, a micro expression that she almost misses, when he touches the cut. He reaches for her first aid kit. “You got a mirror I can borrow? I can sort this out- you go to bed. I’ll be gone when you wake up.”

Karen frowns, more at the last sentence than anything else.

She doesn’t know where he gets his insistent belief that she always wants him out of her life as soon as he enters it. If anything she’d rather he stuck around, where she can see him, where the constant white noise of anxiety about his safety is finally quiet.

“You could barely walk in a straight line five minutes ago.” She steps closer. “I’ll do it.”

Karen puts two fingertips on the side of his chin, tilting his head to one side and towards the light. He’s still chilled to the touch but her fingers come away warm.

"How long were you out there anyway?" Karen asks, soaking a cotton ball.

"Dunno.” Karen eyes him, pressing for a more specific answer. “An hour, two? I lost track."

"Jesus, Frank. Why didn't you let me know you were there? I was literally in here all night."

"You were asleep on the couch when I got here, I didn't- didn't want to wake you. You looked... peaceful, beautiful-“ The last part seems like it slipped out without permission. Karen stills with the cotton over his wound, her breath catching. He glances at her, then sideways and down.

He continues quickly and the moment goes unacknowledged. “And I saw all that stuff you got all over the place-” Frank gestures behind them with his chin, at the paper laid out across every inch of her coffee table and some on her floor, highlighted in multicolour and aggressively thumbed through “-And I figured you need the sleep before you raise hell for whatever shitbags you’re writing about.”

There’s a note of pride and approval in his voice and it runs through her pleasurably, like the first hit of coffee in the morning. What she does isn’t final enough for him. Nothing but a bullet to the brain is final enough for him. She knows that, but acknowledgment that it does work, that what she does has an impact, coming from him... it’s enough for her.

He doesn’t flinch while she runs the cotton over the cut. New blood comes away on the stark white. “So you thought you’d rather freeze to death? Have me writing about your icicle corpse instead?”

“I wasn’t intending on staying, I just closed my eyes to catch my breath and next thing I know you’re shining that blinder torch at me.”

Karen huffs a quiet laugh, pulling off the paper back from a closure. “I didn’t realise it was so comfortable out there. If you want to sublet, just say the word.”

“Nah, just chuck a sleeping bag out for me next time.”

She smiles, smoothing the closure over his skin and feeling the shorn hair of his buzz cut on the tips of her fingers. She takes far longer than is strictly necessary, is careful and meticulous about it, precisely because she knows he wouldn’t be.

Karen is the only person in the world -including him- who believes it but he deserves more care and attention than he ever gives or allows himself to have. And he enters her life so sporadically among his sprees of violence it feels as though it’s up to her alone to give that to him.

(If no one else, Karen is pretty sure Maria Castle would thank her for it and Karen knows enough about Maria Castle to know that that means she’s doing the right thing.)

His eyes drift shut at some point. The whole thing is oddly tranquil: patching up his wounds in the soft lamp light of her apartment, the rest of the world muffled by the window she closed after him.

His chest rises and falls with steady, relaxed breaths. Karen tries to commit the sight to memory.

“There,” she says. Tired eyes flutter open, catch on hers. “All done. Try not to get punched, or knifed, or shot, or... I don’t know- hit over the head with an old lady’s handbag in the next week or two at least.”

The corner of his mouth turns up, pulling at the split in his lip. “My... _demographic_ ain’t usually the geriatric type.”

“Maybe you’re missing a trick. Bet there’s a bunch of grandmas and grandpas screwing the system. Nursing home corruption. Zimmer frame beatings. Bridge club gang warfare.”

It’s too early in the morning for her to be talking anything other than the pure nonsense that’s coming out of her mouth right now, but Frank doesn’t seem to mind. There’s a smirk playing on his lips.

“Well, you write me an exposé and I’ll think about it.”

“I’ll pitch it to Ellison.”

Frank smiles properly now, a rare full smile with teeth and all. As a natural instinct, she wants to smile back, but on some level it just makes her sad. When she thinks about how close he comes to snuffing all that for good -tonight, maybe a matter of inches- and worse, how little he cares. How she has to care about his life for the both of them. It’s tiring.

He seems to sense her mood, seems to attribute himself for the cause—which is true, but not in the way he thinks. Karen runs her thumb lightly over the closed up cut.

“Try to be careful,” she tries. “Please.”

“I’ll try my best.”

Karen doubts that, since no one’s self preservation is less important to The Punisher than his own. Aside from the people he puts down, maybe. Even if he means it now, it’ll be thrown by the wayside soon enough. But for once, she does appreciate being humoured, if only for her own fragile peace of mind.

She tears her eyes away from him with some effort, tightening the lid back on the disinfectant and gathering up the paper backs of the closures, screwing them into a tight ball in her hand.

“Bathroom’s down the hall, second door on the left,” Karen says, replacing the supplies in her cupboards and not looking at him. “Help yourself to anything in the kitchen. The couch isn’t that comfortable but I can get you a couple of pillows-”

“Thanks for the offer, but you ain’t gotta do that. I’m gonna get going.”

She’s too tired to brook any arguments with him. “No, you’re not. It’s freezing out there, Frank, and if you can spend two hours on my fire escape, you can spend at least that long on my couch.”

“Have I got a choice?” he asks after a minute.

“No.”

She stares him down in a stand off, waiting for him to realise she isn’t backing down. At this point, she’ll lock him in if she has to.

Frank sighs and sits down again. He drops the blanket from his shoulders and begins what seems like the long process of unhooking his body armour. Karen nods to herself, satisfied.

She can keep him safe for the night at least. It’s going to have to be enough.

Karen leaves him there, while she searches for some pillows in her linen closet. As it turns out, she doesn’t have any spares so she takes one from her own bed. He needs it more than she does.

When she returns, his gear and boots are lined up neatly on the floor, a handgun on the coffee table in front of him among all her papers. She wonders idly where he stashed his rifle before he got here, hopes the overly officious Neighbourhood Watch-type guy who lives below her isn’t the one to find it.

Frank is already out like a light.

The blood loss and the cold must have done it. She can’t imagine any other reason why he wouldn’t even stir when she attempts to lift his head -which, she finds out, is built like a concrete block- and slide the pillow under him.

Karen pads around him as quietly as she can anyway while she attempts to bring some kind of filing order to the disparate pieces of a nascent story. She isn’t sure where she’s going with it or if it’s even worth bothering with- that’s what she’d been trying to work that out before she fell asleep. It’s ironic really, since the scoop of the year for any journalist but her is knocked out right in front of her.

 _(The Punisher: Found Alive on New York Bulletin Journalist’s Couch_ , the mocked up headline in her head reads. But then, who cares where he was found, really? He’s the story, and the headline ought to reflect that. She’s just an ally, an accomplice. A footnote at best.

Karen imagines Buzzfeed’s take, on the other hand, might be _8 Things The Punisher Does In His Sleep (Number 5 Will Surprise You!_ ) fleshed out with random tweets mined from a quick search of The Punisher hashtag and lined with reaction GIFs from Glee. She would hope whoever ended up covering the story for the Bulletin might aim for slightly higher journalistic standards.)

And now he’s unconscious, Karen hasn’t the self discipline to stop her eyes from drifting back to him every so often. His body is absurdly ill-proportionate to the dimensions of her couch—even with his knees bent, his head is still bowed under the armrest to fit properly. The lamp light throws angular columns of light and darkness over his face- bathing the flat white lines of old scars in orange and casting reset bones in shadow. He looks like a Cubist painting made real and it’s hard to look away.

When he’s here and when he’s not… he makes her heart ache.

He’ll be gone when she wakes up. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> honestly, i was just struck with the image of frank bleeding but not wanting to wake karen and this kind of just _happened_ from there


End file.
